The invention is in the technical field of surgery charge capture and billing software, processes, and devices. In particular, the invention is in the technical field of the generation of visual components on a computer graphical user interface in a manner that reduces the complexity of surgery charge capture.
When a medical service is provided by a physician, to compose a bill the diagnosis and service must be described (“coded”) with accepted diagnosis and services codes. A common system of diagnosis codes in current use is the International Classification of Disease, version 9 (ICD-9), provided by the World Health Organization. A common system of service codes is Common Procedural Terminology (CPT), provided by the American Medical Association.
For charge capture and coding purposes, medical services may be categorized into Evaluation and Management (E & M) and Procedure Services. The Procedure Services include Surgical Services, wherein there is an invasive component. The E & M services generally include a face-to-face encounter between a physician and a patient that may include discussion, ordering of further diagnostic testing, or a prescription for a medicine. There are approximately 30 E & M CPT codes. This is few enough for the codes to be placed on one or several screens by an E & M software program for charge capture, where they may be combined with ICD-9 codes to complete the coding for a medical service bill. There are a number of commercial and noncommercial software programs that offer this functionality.
A Procedure Service, such as a surgery, commonly requires a combination of multiple CPT codes and multiple ICD-9 codes to describe it completely and accurately. There are in excess of 7,500 CPT codes for Procedure and Surgical Services and there are in excess of 5,000 ICD-9 codes. Thus, the combinatorial number of ICD-9 and CPT code combinations is thus very large, and has overwhelmed in its magnitude and complexity attempts to construct a graphical user interface that covers the procedure coding possibilities.
Accordingly, there is a need for reducing the complexity of graphical user interfaces for charge capture in Surgical Services.